Dual-core Motorola Droid 3 launches July 14 for $199 on Verizon

The Droid 3 is set for launch with a dual-core processor, qHD screen, and 8MP …

Motorola has just released the specs for the upcoming Droid 3 handset, which will debut on Verizon's network in less than a week. The biggest changes include an upgrade to a dual-core processor from the Droid 2's single core, an even bigger, prettier screen, and twice the internal storage of its predecessor.

The Droid 3's internals are not exactly bleeding edge, but should put it on par with middling- to high-end phones. The dual core processor is clocked at 1GHz, and the phone carries 512MB of RAM. The internal storage has been bumped to 16GB from 8GB in the Droid 2, with a microSD supplementing it with up to 32GB extra.

The Droid 3's screen will be 4 inches and 960x640 pixels of qHD glory. The form factor is still largely the same, with a slide-out keyboard that now includes a row of numbers. As we expected, the phone will also have an HDMI-out port, and will be able to capture full 1080p HD video with its 8MP camera.

Android 2.3 Gingerbread is Droid 3's OS, and neither Verizon nor Motorola have indicated whether they have any plans for an upgrade trajectory. The phone launches July 14 for $199.99, and will be the first handset that forces its buyers to choose among Verizon's tiered data plans.

$460. but honestly who buys phones off contract, or atleast a partial upgrade.

No point if you're on Verizon. But in areas of the world with real competition between carriers, buying off contract isn't uncommon at all. Or you find a GSM phone that isn't sold in the US and really want to use it.

Wow, second comment complaining about a market with choice. Just give us all the same phone already, who wants options?

I'll do my best to provide a more insightful view, but camel isn't far off the mark. I love choice and I love competition, but I feel the actual hardware on all these phones is basically a commodity at this point, just like the generic PC market. If you want to get average Joe off his dumb phone and onto a smartphone, I doubt he cares about dual core, MHz and memory, it's about the software and the experience. The only real nice hardware features I see here is the qHD display and the 1080p recording, but then again how many people actually buy mini-HDMI plugs for their phones?

Wow, second comment complaining about a market with choice. Just give us all the same phone already, who wants options?

It's not about options. I want these tech giants to actually try to innovate, rather than one-up each other with incremental upgrades.

Blame the carriers. The carriers mostly want to keep things the same so there's little incentive to move elsewhere. Whatever you think of Apple, they have to be given their due for refusing to play the game. As it is, I love my OG Droid, but the lack of 4G has ensured that I'll be moving on to a keyboard Android over at Sprint as soon as my contract's done.

It's a nice piece of hardware, but not enough to make me jump ship from my Droid 2; especially since Cyanogen and Gingerbread are only recently available for the D2. I'll wait another year and see what the D4 looks like, or maybe consider a somewhat-dated D3 with (hopefully) good ROM support.

Some sources talked about a front-facing camera- looks like that was only a rumor.

The most appealing thing to me is the extra row on the keyboard; I think that will be the case for a lot of buyers. It was the only standout feature on the D2 and that pattern looks set to continue: Incremental but well-reasoned updates that keep it within sight of the cutting edge.

To hell with 4G; as long as they're charging extortionate rates for bandwidth it's nothing but a quicker race to overage charges. I'll stick with my grandfathered, unlimited 3G until 4G plans get sensible.

...which is heavily influenced by processor power and memory. Duh. Obviously other stuff matters too, but do you people really think that we're already done on smart phones with increases in power, that everything is set right now? Really? That's nuts.

And sorry, but enraged_camel's post was absolutely a troll, from start to finish. He doesn't want "incremental" upgrades, as if there's anything else, he wants "innovation" (whatever they hell that means, he doesn't say). The phone makers, in general, are source nearly all the core hardware from the same manufacturers. There's no way to do anything else. Why not tossing out some actual suggestions? What do you want, that actually exists? It's very easy to armchair general on some forum, but it's not productive, and doesn't at all acknowledge the realities of the sorts of cost and power envelopes that real designs have to deal with.

I can certainly see areas that currently are less then ideal, and thus might be subject to improvement. I think control schemes, particularly for man games, could use work for example. Sony's NGP, with a control surface on the back of the device, is an example of an interesting possible way to improve that. It may not work, but there's an example of something to actually think about. Stupid whines about how XYZ isn't "innovative" enough have got to be some of the most worthless and most common retard comments to see on a technical forum, pure noise.

Sheesh, give it a rest, eCamel. Not everyone needs bold innovations in commodity product updates. Does your toaster oven have NFC and link to a borborygmi sensor in your belt?

Heck, in the case of a device named "Droid 3", bleeding edge tech probably isn't even WANTED. Buyers should expect it to be very much like the Droid and the Droid 2, with the standard incremental improvements. Unusual new features are more likely to be appreciated in other product branches.

It's not about options. I want these tech giants to actually try to innovate, rather than one-up each other with incremental upgrades.

You are implying a dichotomy that does not exist. Innovation is, more often than not, the aggregate of incremental changes.

Absolutely incorrect.

Apple basically reshaped the marketplace with the iPhone. They then repeated the same thing a few years later with the iPad.

What are the other players doing? Are they introducing new categories of devices? Nope. They are simply copying what Apple has done.

It's really frustrating that only one player in the entire tablet and smartphone market is actually busting ass trying to come up with new and disruptive technologies that revolutionize the way we think and do work, while others are like "oh hey we'll just copy Apple's UI exactly the way it is" or "let's just put a slightly faster processor in this and call it Evo/Desire/Banana."

How about battery life? That's one reason (the other being cost) that I'm sticking with a feature phone for my personal mobile. If they can boost battery life past a day or so, I could be more interested.

So are they saying you can't get this phone with a grandfathered unlimited plan?

People buying the phone have said you have to contact them and they will work your account to grandfather you in. So at first it seems that you need the new tiered data but that is only for people upgrading to a new data plan.

It's not about options. I want these tech giants to actually try to innovate, rather than one-up each other with incremental upgrades.

You are implying a dichotomy that does not exist. Innovation is, more often than not, the aggregate of incremental changes.

Absolutely incorrect.

Apple basically reshaped the marketplace with the iPhone. They then repeated the same thing a few years later with the iPad.

What are the other players doing? Are they introducing new categories of devices? Nope. They are simply copying what Apple has done.

It's really frustrating that only one player in the entire tablet and smartphone market is actually busting ass trying to come up with new and disruptive technologies that revolutionize the way we think and do work, while others are like "oh hey we'll just copy Apple's UI exactly the way it is" or "let's just put a slightly faster processor in this and call it Evo/Desire/Banana."

oh god

so you are still on your first iphone then i assume? all other iphones have been updates to the first phone.

if you cannot see that both approaches aren't right or wrong but a result of different preconditions, goals and assumptions, that leadi to similar results and wider choice for the consumer i dont understand why you are reading ars technica in the first please. Go get your daily dose of tech delirium on macrumors kid.

correction on article: qHD on this phone is 540x960, not the iphone 4 resolution & aspect ratio

What are the other players doing? Are they introducing new categories of devices? Nope. They are simply copying what Apple has done.

It's really frustrating that only one player in the entire tablet and smartphone market is actually busting ass trying to come up with new and disruptive technologies that revolutionize the way we think and do work, while others are like "oh hey we'll just copy Apple's UI exactly the way it is" or "let's just put a slightly faster processor in this and call it Evo/Desire/Banana."

I'm going to have to call BS here. The iPhone and the iPad are both derivative works. Touchscreen technology, smartphones, tablets, and online stores were all around before either of Apple's devices came onto the scene. Apple's "innovation" consists of combining existing concepts, streamlining them to play very nicely with each other and not nicely at all with anything outside of its ecosystem, and then throwing huge amounts of marketing behind them.

By your metrics NOTHING NEW has been happening in this market, except commodity tech improvements, for a decade or more. Bull. The Droid 3 is certainly derivative of the Droid 2, just as the iPhone x is derivative of the iPhone (x-1).

What are the other players doing? Are they introducing new categories of devices? Nope. They are simply copying what Apple has done.

Apple did indeed reshape the phone marketplace... as Blackberry, Danger, Motorola and Nokia had done before it. The Iphone had many innovations, many of which were incremental advances of other's innovations. Danger invented the app sales for mobile devices, Blackberry got mobile web services working. Apple, made significant improvements to those services, but it would be "absolutely incorrect" to believe that they were some clean-sheet inventions rather than incremental improvements.

There is plenty of other innovation that does not fit through your Apple-shaped blinders, as does the fact that Apple's fine work is often incremental advances of others' innovations.

$460. but honestly who buys phones off contract, or atleast a partial upgrade.

No point if you're on Verizon. But in areas of the world with real competition between carriers, buying off contract isn't uncommon at all. Or you find a GSM phone that isn't sold in the US and really want to use it.

uhhggg,, GSM

Real carriers use CDMA. GSM is for carries that only care about making things cheap, not better.

What are the other players doing? Are they introducing new categories of devices? Nope. They are simply copying what Apple has done.

It's really frustrating that only one player in the entire tablet and smartphone market is actually busting ass trying to come up with new and disruptive technologies that revolutionize the way we think and do work, while others are like "oh hey we'll just copy Apple's UI exactly the way it is" or "let's just put a slightly faster processor in this and call it Evo/Desire/Banana."

I'm going to have to call BS here. The iPhone and the iPad are both derivative works. Touchscreen technology, smartphones, tablets, and online stores were all around before either of Apple's devices came onto the scene. Apple's "innovation" consists of combining existing concepts, streamlining them to play very nicely with each other and not nicely at all with anything outside of its ecosystem, and then throwing huge amounts of marketing behind them.

By your metrics NOTHING NEW has been happening in this market, except commodity tech improvements, for a decade or more. Bull. The Droid 3 is certainly derivative of the Droid 2, just as the iPhone x is derivative of the iPhone (x-1).

Yeah, I think I had my first flash memory based MP3 player somewhere around '96-'98 (I was still in High School I know). Granted, it had a whopping 64MB of storage at the time, but still, it was a digital MP3 player. It had a nice little screen, fit into my pocket, and was great for workouts. It even had a shuffle button (although I don't know if it was called "shuffle") back then.

The iPod launched in October of 2001. It was not a "new class" of device at all, but as GByteKnight said, merely a combination of existing products with some streamlining. And then a whole lot of marketing hype... Their biggest contribution to the market was large internal storage and a decent battery, both of which were just incremental improvements over earlier products (some might even say that these weren't universally "improvements", since you couldn't replace your battery yourself or upgrade the memory, but that's a different sort of debate).

Also, just look at what Apple has done since releasing the iPod. They got bigger and bigger, eventually got a touch screen, and.....? What big innovation has happened in that product line in the past 10 years? Even the apps on the iPod Touch aren't an "innovation", since that was merely porting over the AppStore from the iPhone. They created a really hot product 10 years ago, and have basically just been iterating ever since. They've done the same thing with the iPhone and now the iPad as well. They'll continue to do this until the next big idea comes along, just as everyone else will. That's the way that tech works.

My biggest complaint with these Android phones is the bloatware and third-party "operating systems" or "overlays" like HTC Sense or Motoblur.

I just want a stock Froyo or Gingerbread or whatever the latest native Android OS is. My HTC Thunderbolt has really nice hardware specifications (to me at least) but the HTC Sense software drives me crazy. Why pair all this junk software to such nice hardware? I understand manufactures want to distinguish themselves in a crowded phone ecosystem (and some people actually like Sense), but at the very least, give me an easy way to remove it! Please!

That said, I wonder if this phone has special Motorola layer or comes loaded with apps that I'll never use, suck the battery, and I can't remove without rooting the phone.

I live in a 4G city (Phoenix) and a coworker got the Droid Thunderbolt. The 4G coverage is so spotty that his phone was extremely slow. He ended up returning it to VZ within his trial period. I haven't personally had a 4G phone, but judging by his experience, I'm not dissapointed that the Droid 3 this isn't 4G/LTE. I will wait until it is more broadly distributed before I get a phone that supports it.

I'm just pissed that the new tiered data plans don't have steps lower that 2GBs for smartphones. They originally advertised 500MB for $15 or 2GB for $25, which I would have been fine with. I don't usually use much more than 800mb-1.2gb a month, so saving $5 a month on the 2GB plan sounded good to me. But looking at VZ.com today after the Droid 3 announcement, the lowest package a smartphone can get is 2GBs for $30, which is how much I have been paying for unlimited data. This may be the reason why I don't get a new phone anytime soon. I have an orginal Droid, that is still working well, but its starting to get a little banged up, plus I want a new phone since Android decided not to send new OS updates to the old model, ie no Gingerbread. Bad choices by both VZ and Android :(